


A Farm in Gascony

by doomcanary



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Angst, Aramis is clueless, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Gen, M/M, OT4
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-20
Updated: 2016-11-03
Packaged: 2018-01-20 04:38:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 14,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1496932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomcanary/pseuds/doomcanary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"All for one" takes on a new meaning when Aramis's indiscretions threaten to become a problem. The story of how Treville lost patience, Athos lost his head, Porthos lost his bearings, and Aramis lost everything (but got something very different in its place). D'Artagnan gets back his family farm - but his reputation will never be quite the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If you're enjoying this and reading along PLEASE do hit Subscribe - I update at completely random intervals and that way you'll know when there's more to read!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Louis is delighted with the men who saved his Queen's life, but the Cardinal has other ideas. And Treville isn't pleased with what he sees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the fact this chapter keeps changing tense... I hope it's still readable anyway! This fic is technically set in the same 'verse as [Together as Fools](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1373275), which is a kind of character study. There's a lot more detail to come though :)

Athos, Porthos, Aramis and d'Artagnan stand to attention, shepherded by Treville. The five stand before a dais set in an echoing marble-tiled hall. The voices around them are barely muffled by the Court finery on grand display; d'Artagnan is beginning to get a headache.

“- to recognise the honour and loyalty displayed by these men as befits their service and their rank,” drones on the Privy Counsellor. His Majesty's attention wanders to Anne; he pats her hand and she inclines her head and smiles.

Aramis sets his jaw against the swoop in his guts the little gesture draws. He can feel the Cardinal's eyes on him like daggers at his throat.

 

After the short ceremony the four Musketeers are honoured with a reception; Their Majesties and the higher-ranking nobles of the Court mingle among them and make unutterably inane small talk while sipping champagne. Porthos resorts to tales of derring-do and soon has an attentive audience of lordlings who would like to think they'll make Musketeers. He's not impressed by the prospects of any of them. D'Artagnan wanders away to find a quiet spot in the shade and enjoy his champagne.

 

Treville, Athos and Aramis have been cornered against a column by a blowsy middle-aged Countess who is most impressed with Aramis's looks.

“You simply _must_ visit Dansigny,” she coos, hanging from his arm. “The hunting in summer is truly sublime.”

“Alas, Musketeers are bound by duty to follow the King,” says Treville crisply, before Aramis can open his mouth to reply. Athos observes Aramis's face take on a relieved sort of look; the Comtesse is sadly somewhat past her prime. And then both their hearts sink as a smooth, only too familiar voice insinuates itself into their ears.

“Madame la Comtesse,” greets Cardinal Richelieu. “His Majesty requests that you join him at cards.”

“Oh!” she giggles, fan fluttering before her. “My own duty calls, Messieurs; until another time.”

There's a pause.

“I trust Her Majesty continues well,” offers Treville.

“She is most remarkably content and at peace,” the cardinal replies. “And the King could not be more delighted.”

“It is indeed a gift after such doubt.”

“I quite agree,” says rthe Cardinal, and there's that hideous, slippery edge to his voice, like a dagger covered in grease and soot to stop its blade catching light at night time. He nods towards Aramis. “As I was saying to your colleague not long after the incident,” he continues, “one might even call it a miracle.”

Aramis's stomach drops. He tries to keep his face under control. Treville's shoulders tense very slightly, the change almost invisible to anyone who hasn't been terrified by the man's temper twice weekly for several years. He's watching the Cardinal now. Leaning against the next column along, d'Artagnan suddenly finds his attention drawn to the Captain; he has no idea what just happened but he can see Treville's tension, see how his whole focus is suddenly on the spot where Richelieu stands. Richelieu is impassive, his monochromatic eyes and shrivelled face like wet pebbles lying on a dried-out corpse. The Devil's own priest, d'Artagnan thinks. His captain's unease makes his soldier's senses scream _threat_.

For his part, Athos feels his emotions drop away; the perfect facade of a well-schooled nobleman clicks smoothly into their place. He smiles at the Cardinal blandly.

“With such a man as Your Eminence on their side, can a miracle really be so surprising?” he replies. The Cardinal's eyes flicker for just a moment. It's true enough – if he hadn't been trying to kill the Queen, she would never have been put in such a compromised situation. (And Aramis would never have had his chance, adds a mutinous little part of Athos's mind.) Athos finds it satisfying to see the Cardinal hoist by his own petard.

Although it occurs to him he may also have just told Richelieu he knows what happened. Mercifully, at that point Louis ambles over to butt in.

“My thoughts exactly,” says the King with a wide, delighted smile. “I am certain that like any good Frenchman the Cardinal has prayed nightly for the happiness of the Queen and for France to have an heir. It is simply that your words reach the ears of God more quickly, Armand.”

Athos cringes inwardly for the King. Treville remains expressionless, but a sharp and bitter rage shows in his eyes for just a moment.

“A truer word was never spoken, Your Majesty,” he agrees.

At that, at least, the Cardinal has the sense to close his mouth.

“Has anyone seen the Comtesse d'Arrechaud?” Louis asks. “I was thinking I might ask her to play me at cards.”

Aramis just looks as if he's fighting not to collapse.

 

Unlike the King or the Cardinal, however, Treville is neither stupid nor in a compromised position. As soon as they ride back into the garrison he bellows for Jacques to take the horses and marches all four of them into his office. They stand there in a row like schoolboys accused of misbehaviour; Treville folds his arms and just stares. The silence stretches, and stretches. Porthos shifts his weight.

“Sir?” ventures d'Artagnan.

“Silence!” barks Treville. D'Artagnan and Porthos exchange a bemused look. Athos maintains a rigid composure, eyes front and centre. Aramis is visibly pale.

“Porthos, d'Artagnan, get out of my sight,” Treville finally decides. The clatter of their boots on the wooden stairs has receded into silence by the time he speaks again.

“I do not know what happened in that convent,” he says, in a dangerously quiet voice. “Furthermore, I pray to almighty God that I will remain blissful in my ignorance until the day I die. You two, on the other hand, clearly know far more than is good for the health of any man. You will both spend the next month conducting yourselves as model Musketeers, until such time as I find a way to get you away from Paris and Richelieu's eyes.”

Inwardly Athos bristles. This is the same Treville who ordered his men into Savoy – the man who is the reason Aramis's eyes turn haunted and lightless when they ride through the woods sometimes. He controls himself; Treville made a serious mistake, but he made it in good faith and took responsibility like a true captain. Aramis's mistake may also have been honest, but unlike Treville, his amounts to treason. The nation could fall if what he and Aramis know reached the wrong ears. Circumstance is a vicious master.

He can almost feel Aramis shaking.

“Understood, Sir. Will that be all for the present?” he enquires, keeping his tone as carefully neutral as he can.

Aramis walks down the wooden steps like a man who's just seen both his parents die, and carries straight on out of the garrison gates when he reaches the ground.

 

“Shouldn't we go after him?” says d'Artagnan, at Athos's elbow.

“He might just want to be left alone,” says Porthos.

“Leave Aramis to me,” says Athos. The other two look at him sharply, surprised at the anger in his voice.

 _We're good?_ asks Aramis's voice in Athos's mind.

Just because Athos is not his blood brother doesn't mean he won't hand out a few home truths when the time is right.

 

* * *

 

He finds Aramis in his rooms, as he'd thought he might; a half-drunk glass of wine is on the table before him and he is staring sightlessly into the fire. He flinches at the sound of the door opening, but returns to his reverie when he sees Athos's face.

Athos picks up another glass and pours himself wine; the bottle has barely been touched at all.

“Well?” he asks.

Aramis looks at him in utter disbelief.

“ _Well?_ ” he says. “How well would any man be after that little display? He knows!”

“The Cardinal has no more proof than Treville.”

“And Treville's sending us away based on nothing more than suspicion! I'm never -”

“Never what?” asks Athos.

Aramis's shoulders drop. “I won't see her,” he says. “I won't know if she's well. I'll never be able to be a-”

“You _are not_ the father of that child,” says Athos. “The child, _if_ it is born living and healthy which we cannot yet know, will be the heir apparent to the throne of France and will be brought up with every privilege pertaining to that position. _You_ will simply be a Musketeer with a very inappropriate attachment to the heir.”

Aramis looks up at him then, and the blankness in his eyes, so like what Athos sees in the woods sometimes, suddenly melts into raw pain.

“Get out, Athos,” he says. “Get out.”

“Aramis-”

“GET OUT!” Aramis roars, and out of nowhere his sword is in his hand. Athos raises his hands, palms out, and steps back before turning for the door. As he goes down the stairs he hears Aramis cast the sword aside with a clatter, and the all too familiar sound of a bottle being dragged across wood. He sighs, and squares his shoulders under the guilt of hurting his friend.

At least Aramis won't be anywhere near royalty for a while.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aramis is really not OK.

Isabelle, Isabelle, _Isabelle_. His child, lost once already. Anne had given hope back to him, allowed him to touch the face of beauty once again – and yet his country, his King, his God saw fit to take that away.

What had he done? What sin deserved such punishment? The wine merely dulled the edge of his thoughts, the fear and rage and misery a lead weight untouched inside.

He found himself wandering the streets, a different bottle dangling from his hand. Everywhere there were faces, the blank judging masks of city folk, pretty girls with eyes like Isabelle's. Every one of those young girls seemed a mother and every mother seemed as the Virgin, gazing down at her child in perfect love. All that he would never have surrounded him. He leaned too long against a wall watching a woman give suck to her baby, and was chased staggering off by her angry husband. Anne's cross hung like a millstone at his neck, weighing down his head and bowing his spine. He took it off, and walked on with it dangling from his hand.

 

“What the hell did you say to him?” Porthos demanded, standing amid the wreckage of the table in Aramis's rooms.

“I told him the truth,” said Athos dryly. “There comes a time when it reaches every man.”

“For God's sake, Athos, don't you know him at all? You can't just come out with the hard stuff to Aramis, he's sensitive -”

“He is up to his neck in something more serious than you can possibly imagine,” says Athos tightly, “and I will not tell you what it is because your neck would be at risk as well.”

Porthos sets his heavy hands on the back of the remaining chair, and meets Athos's eyes. His expression chills Athos despite the years he's known Porthos by his side.

“All for one,” says Porthos. “Except when it don't suit Athos, of course.” He turns away.

D'Artagnan returns from talking to the landlady, and the moment is gone. Outside the evening sky is darkening.

 

Aramis doesn't know the name of this tavern, or even if it has one; it has noise and fug and people, and that is enough. He's beginning to see the night in flashes; a face, a shouted conversation, a half-drawn sword. He gets up to go to the bar for another bottle, and somehow finishes up lying between the trestles of the table beside him, its top tipped beneath him and the occupants' card game scattered across the floor.

“Oi!”

“Bloody idiot -”

“Looks like he's had more than enough,” says a strange voice behind him. “Up you get, mate.”

Hands hook into his armpits and haul him upright. Cold air hits his cheeks, and then his backside hits something more or less soft, and he gives in.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aramis meets an old friend.

There is something eternal about churches; as there should be, of course. Aramis slips quietly into a pew near the back and takes off his hat; his tongue feels thick and his head throbs steadily. The light here is fresh, this little place too mean for the stained glass of the noble cathedrals in the city's heart; but the altar cloth glows scarlet, and the walls and ceiling are rich with many scenes. The lingering scent of incense hangs in the air. That scent, if nothing else, could be the air of any church he has ever entered. It soothes him, despite his hangover.

He is alone; it's early, long before public Mass and the crowd of strangers who would jostle and press. Barely after dawn, in fact. He waits, head bowed, until he hears the sound of a door and footsteps approaching from the transept.

When he meets the eyes of the priest, shock sends a stab of dull pain through the socket of his eye.

“Father Trudeau,” he says, astonished.

“René,” is the priest's reply.

The older man's stride pauses; Aramis glances helplessly towards the confessional, and Father Trudeau nods and carries on. Aramis sees the priest's back straightens a little as he moves towards the booth. It only makes his own misery weigh heavier in his veins.

 

“Father forgive me, for I have sinned. It has been six days since my last confession.”

“It is good to see you again, René,” comes the priest's voice softly.

Aramis lets the name hang for a long empty moment on the air. It has been so long since he's heard that voice, that name. His life had been so much simpler then.

“What is your sin?” asks Father Trudeau gently.

Aramis sighs. “In truth I woke up in a heap of straw outside,” he says. “I don't know if I came in here to seek absolution, or simply to get out of the morning light.”

“A heap of straw,” says Trudeau levelly, his voice touched with amusement.

“I was... it was a drunken night.”

“So it would seem.” He pauses. “And yet of all the churches in Paris your wandering brought you here.”

Aramis considers that quietly. It is one hell of a coincidence.

“I can see that your heart is heavy. Unburden your soul.”

“I wish it were so simple.” He closes his eyes. “My brother Musketeers are angry with me, my captain would have me sent to the country like a student in disgrace, it's... I don't know where to start.”

“At the beginning, perhaps. What caused all this, René?”

“A woman.”

Silence. He can almost imagine the abbé trying not to smile.

“She is... high-born. Far above my station. Married to a powerful man. I... I had knowledge of her. Carnally. And now... she is with child.”

“History repeats itself,” says Father Trudeau. Aramis is cut to the bone.

“I only slept with her because Isabelle was dead!” he says.

And then he is cut all over again by his own words.

“God rest poor Isabelle's soul,” says the priest reflexively. “But it seems there is a great deal you must tell me if I am to understand.”

“Too much.” His eyes sting with the memory and his voice wavers. “It wasn't Isabelle's parents who hid her away. She... she took holy orders. By her own choice, after she lost our child. She begged her father to tell me nothing of where she had gone. And all because she saw in me a man who was not made for marriage.”

“How do you fare in the King's service?” asks the priest.

“I bring death and disaster everywhere I go. Isabelle died of a musket shot, fired by a man intent on killing the Queen. I only saw her at all because we took refuge in the convent she joined. We were trying to protect Her Majesty from assassination.”

“And it was after this that you took this noblewoman to your bed?”

Aramis swallows, around the lie of omission he holds like a lead weight in his mouth. His headache stabs at him as if it knows. “She came to me. She was kind... she thanked me for doing my duty, for protecting... for protecting the royal household. And I...”

Father Trudeau waits, with the patience of angels themselves.

“I fell into her bed as if she were some tavern girl. I took comfort in her body. There was nothing of love in it at all, I was – I was a fool. I raised my eyes to her as if she were a saint, I thought I loved her, but-” He chokes on the words and forces them out on a sob. “I lay with her only for my own selfish need.”

“And now she is with child.”

“And if her husband finds out he'll have me hanged.”

Through the grille that separates them Aramis sees Father Trudeau's head come up to gaze into the distance, as if the heavy velvet curtain was mere gauze. He contemplates silently.

“Strange, René,” he says at last, “that you seem more concerned to have used a high-born lady ill than you do to have her husband's hounds at your heels.”

“I live with the spectre of death every day,” says Aramis, but the insight comforts him nonetheless. He must care, somehow, to be so disarrayed by it all.

“When I knew René, long before he was Aramis, I knew a passionate, driven young man who loved his God and his women in equal measure. You never could resolve the struggle between those two.”

True enough. Aramis waits.

“It seems to me that in recent years Aramis the soldier has forgotten that René d'Herblay once was nearly a priest. I think the sin you bring to me today is not that you had knowledge of this woman, or even that you have got her with child. It is that you have become a man who could do such a thing without love for the woman he beds.”

Aramis feels as if a shaft of light from Heaven itself has pierced through the fog that has confounded his senses ever since he heard the news of Anne. Father Trudeau is right, as he's always been. Perhaps God really had guided his drunken wandering.

“Pride and adultery,” he says quietly. “Truly I am damned.”

“To take pride in your own depravity is a greater sin still,” says Father Trudeau sharply, looking at him. Aramis drops his head, chastened and relieved.

“You have sinned against this woman, my son,” says the priest eventually, “but your greater sin is against yourself, and therefore against God. You have turned away from Him and become blind to the love of Christ, and the ways it seeks to work through you.”

Aramis wonders then for a moment what Father Trudeau would say if he knew that God's love had, in this particular case, potentially granted the King of France an heir. But René cannot deny that the old priest's words have weight. Let God himself take care of His mysterious ways.

“What is my penance?” he asks nervously.

“For your sin of adultery, Ten Hail Marys and five Our Fathers,” replies Father Trudeau promptly. Aramis looks up in disbelief – so little?

“Every morning and night until the child is born.” Aramis sees him fold his hands contentedly over his belly with a satisfied smile. Father Trudeau had always been a bit of a bastard; it had been what Aramis liked about him.

What René liked about him, too.

“As for your greater sin, child, you must turn yourself away from women and back towards your God again. Pray to St Anthony for guidance, and to holy Mary for her intercession in your life. Perhaps through her ineffable love you may come to know Christ again and see a truer direction for your soul. I would suggest,” he adds, “remaining celibate for a minimum of a year.”

Aramis, the soldier, is utterly shocked. A year without love?

But – is it not Aramis's idea of love that has led poor René into such grave sins?

Father Trudeau dismisses him with the old, familiar words, and he lingers to say the first of his many prayers, the beads of his rosary warm and familiar in his hand.

René Aramis d'Herblay is strangely light as he makes his way back to his familiar life.

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Athos surprises everyone, and d'Artagnan sees the reality of being a Musketeer.

“Good afternoon, Lucille,” says Athos, tipping his hat with a smile to the landlord’s wife. She looks at him, surprised and impressed.

“The usual, is it?”

“The good stuff today, please,” says Athos, nodding to her and making his way to their usual table.

“He’s in a good mood,” remarks her husband.

“Most I’ve heard him say in a year,” Lucille replies, reaching for the dustier bottles at the back of the shelf.

 

“D’Artagnan,” says Treville, looking up with quill in hand. “Sit down.”

D’Artagnan is, to put it mildly, instantly out of his comfort zone. He has no idea why Treville has called him in - whether he’s about to be praised or given a dressing-down. He settles himself on the hard chair in front of Treville’s desk and tries not to tap his foot nervously.

“Sorry about this,” carries on Treville. “I won’t be a moment.”

“I don’t have any other appointments,” says d’Artagnan inanely.

Treville raises a mildly amused eye, signs the document he’s reading with a flourish and drops his quill back into the inkwell.

“Now,” he says. “About this land of yours in Gascony, the farm that Labarge left in such a state.”

“Sir?”

“How do you fancy a chance to put the place back together, and do the King’s work at the same time?”

 

Porthos is on his way to the inn to meet Athos. It’s a fine afternoon and he’s dawdling in the little marketplace by the garrison, idly considering stopping for a pastry and watching the world go by. A young girl who reminds him a bit of Flea - a lot cleaner, mind you, than Flea usually was at her age - is playing a skipping game on the cobbles; she takes turns with two of her friends, tossing a pebble and balancing on one leg to pick it up again. Couples wander between the stalls, housewives bustle about their business - he thinks he sees Constance for a moment, but it’s just someone with a skirt the same colour as hers - and stray dogs lie in the sun, soaking up the warmth as if it sustains them by itself.

He can map the route between here and Athos in his head; streets he’s known since before he can remember, though it’s only lately that he’s come to think of such a fine district as home. As a child he remembers lounging with the dogs in other markets, taking an idle moment to sun himself before Charon would whistle and they’d be off after another mark, some portly merchant with a full purse and a distracted eye. He remembers the first time he ever bought a pastry in this market. His first pay packet as a Musketeer had weighed like all the wealth of the world in his pocket, and the warm, buttery flakes on his tongue tasted of cinnamon and hope.

Maybe he’ll get another one, just for old times’ sake.

 

Aramis is cleaning his pistols, tucked out of the way in a corner of the courtyard. He concentrates on his work, ignoring the footsteps passing by, glad of each set that taps away into the distance uninterrupted.

“Aramis,” says a voice. He looks up.

“Fresneur,” he replies curtly.

“You all right?” asks Fresneur. He’s been with the company nearly as long as Athos, and has the respect of many a man. “Mantes and I thought you’d been looking a bit glum lately, wondered if you fancied a game of cards.”

“Thankyou, my friend, but no,” says Aramis, hiding a wince behind a smile. “I’ve a great deal to do today.”

“Still and all,” says Fresneur. “It can’t always be sunshine, even with you four - doesn’t hurt to talk to a friendly ear if the usual ones go deaf for a while. We’ll be in the Spaniard’s Ear tonight if you’d care to join us.”

“Thankyou again,” says Aramis. “I’ll see if I have time.”

Fresneur watches him for a moment before he nods and ambles away. Aramis scrubs at the inlay on the pistol in his hand as if it’s personally offended him, and wishes to God he was a Red Guard. He’d bet the Cardinal’s misbegotten shower of wife-beaters and sellswords don’t harass their fellow men for the sake of “their own good”.

He’d bet that “you four” - and when did d’Artagnan become such a fixture, he asks his pistols bitterly as he refolds his discoloured rag - are the talk of the barracks; the Inseparables separated. Athos the imperturbable stalking about the barracks shedding rage as a winter traveller sheds snow, and Aramis the master lover spending half his time in the chapel and the other half sequestered in his rooms. Perhaps he’s taken up lacemaking, they’ll joke.

God, there is no sensible answer to this maddening situation. For the first time since he left home, he wonders about resigning his commission, and returning to the priesthood after all.

Better a stuffy confessional than this suffocating little Hell.

 

“I don’t understand, Sir,” says d’Artagnan. “Why would the King wish me to rebuild my farm?”

“He doesn’t,” replies Treville. “What he does wish to do, or more accurately wishes me to do for him, is find out who in Gascony is helping smuggle spies, and the treasonous information they obtain, back and forth over the border with Spain.”

D’Artagnan’s eyebrows rise. He hasn’t been in Paris long but already the intrigues and scandals of the courtly world here make Gascony’s little pond of nobility seem as placid as a herd of cows.

“I’m as disgusted as you are,” says Treville, misreading his startlement as Gascon patriotism, “but the fact remains it’s happening and the rot must be cut out.”

“Of course, Sir,” says d’Artagnan. “And you propose that I take advantage of my situation to return to Gascony and gather information.”

“You won’t be travelling alone,” says Treville. “I’ll be sending a small detachment of men with you to investigate the possibility of a new southern garrison. His Majesty is also concerned that at present, should open war with Spain occur, his troops have nowhere closer to the border than Bordeaux as a staging post and supply dump.”

“Athos and Aramis, I assume?” says d’Artagnan.

“Porthos too, naturally. They’re trusted and experienced men.”

D’Artagnan nods, considering. So this is about whatever it is Aramis and Athos have got themselves involved with.

“I do hope I’ve done nothing to displease either His Majesty or you,” he says, by way of a reply.

Treville sees straight through it, in that infuriatingly pragmatic way he has. He sits back in his chair and looks at d’Artagnan levelly.

“There is important work to be done, d’Artagnan, and you are the man,” he says.

“But something tells me this isn’t just about the spies,” d’Artagnan persists stubbornly.

 

Porthos rolls up to the tavern with crumbs in his moustache, winks at the barmaid and conspiratorially presents Athos with a somewhat flattened pain au chocolat.

“Delightful,” says Athos dryly. He eats it anyway. The landlady comes over with another bottle and glass.

“How’s the most beautiful woman in the district?” Porthos asks.

“Just as sick of your cheek as I always was,” Lucille replies briskl,y. “No need to butter me up tonight, anyway, Monsieur Athos is paying for the decent wine.”

“Is that a fact?” says Porthos. “I’d better have some then.”

“Just you mind you don’t wind up under the table like your Gascon friend,” she warns.

“It’s not my fault he tried to keep up with Athos -” but Lucille has bustled away, called back to the crowded bar.

“So how are you, my friend?” Athos enquires.

“Blimey,” says Porthos. “Are you feeling all right?”

 

“You, my boy, are so sharp you’ll cut yourself,” says Treville. “You have your orders, and you should stand to get a steady income back as a result of them.”

D’Artagnan nods. ”I’ll admit that much,” he says. “One for all is one thing, but we’re all behind the idea of more to go round.”

“Then don’t ask questions you don’t need the answers to,” Treville replies. He fixes d’Artagnan with a fobiddingly sober eye. “Some secrets are best left buried. Take my advice: it will be for the best if you continue not to understand.” He hands over a sealed letter. “Here are your orders, and also a letter of credit on a bank in Tarbes to keep you fed while you haul the farm back from the ashes of ruin.”

D’Artagnan realises then that he actually has no idea what he’ll find.

“Let’s hope it’s not too heavy a job,” Treville says, not without a certain sympathy.

 

Aramis skulks in a half hour later, sits himself in the darkest corner - usually occupied by Athos - downs a glass of wine without ceremony and applies himself to eating a plate of food. Porthos finds it surprising exactly how strongly Aramis can project the desire not to be disturbed when he so desires. There are a couple of other Musketeers in the inn - it’s a popular place with the garrison - and occasionally Aramis casts resentful glances at them, as if he wishes he were anywhere but here.

“Where’s the new recruit, then?” asks Porthos amiably.

“No idea,” says Athos. “How about a game of cards?”

Porthos is delighted, right up until the point at which he realises Athos has also learnt to keep kings up his sleeve.

 

D’Artagnan, walking through the twilit streets to the familiar, noisy entrance of the Wren, wonders if this was how his father felt on the long ride up to Paris. Unknown and unsolved problems weighing on his shoulders; loose ends trailing at every corner and himself the bearer of news he suspects may not be easily told. The Musketeer pauldron he’d been so proud of now seems a symbol of the heavy responsibility he bears. He had thought it would be such a pleasant, organised world, to be one’s own man and be in charge.

He’d grown up on that farm, in the summers; what will it do to his heart, to see it all destroyed?

The door of the Wren is before him; like the soldier he is, d’Artagnan squares himself in the face of the future, and takes the next step.

 

Porthos, at the table, is cackling with delight; Athos is simply watching him evenly, a slight smile playing about his lips as he drinks his wine.

“I knew you had it in you!” Porthos says.

“Speaking of the new recruit,” says Athos, nodding at a familiar figure heading towards their lair.

Porthos turns, but the jovial greeting dies on his lips when he sees the heavy expression in d’Artagnan’s eyes.

“Well, I’ve got some news,” he says, holding up a letter with a broken seal. “We’re going away for a while.” 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Porthos is devious, D'Artagnan is a puppy, and a road trip makes it hard to sulk alone. Oh - and a couple of little secrets come out as well.

They are a long week’s ride out of Paris, ambling through the countryside south of Tours. The weather is good and the horses are holding up well; Athos scratches gloved fingers through the roots of Peppercorn’s mane where it meets his withers, and lets the reins fall loose for a while. Peppercorn gratefully drops his head, snorting long and loud.

Ahead of him Porthos and d’Artagnan are riding either side of Aramis, black North and heavyset Bourbon bracketing Darling with her delicate bone like bookends either side of a fine book. D’Artagnan’s knee brushes the undergrowth beside the road but he doesn’t seem to mind. They’re silent for now, but they’ve been exchanging conversation now and again; Aramis for the most part is quiet, but Porthos and d’Artagnan draw him out whenever they can.

Athos has not failed to notice the way the other two give him their backs when they’re riding, and coddle Aramis given half a chance. And it’s true, the man is silent and downcast, his mood lifting a very little when they left Paris but remaining distant and quiet ever since. Athos is mildly irritated, but the others are entirely ignorant of the matter so for the most part he occupies himself with his own thoughts. He is astonished at himself since Milady’s vanishment; the world seems a different place. He finds himself curious about things he would have ignored, exchanging civil words with landlords and other guests when they stay at an inn. It’s not lost on him that he and Aramis have changed places, in effect - but for Athos’s lack of interest in the fairer sex, that is. He catches Porthos watching him consideringly sometimes; d’Artagnan recently has had the air of a spaniel whose master has fallen out with his wife and is torn between the study and the parlour, not knowing whose kindness to seek out first. He shoots Athos half-guilty looks now and again, but for the most part falls in with Porthos’s presence at Aramis’s side.

Athos is happy to have a little time. For years his stalwart companions have been his brothers and his wine; and yet somehow even after d’Artagnan’s forceful debut into their lives that brotherhood had washed past him and left him unmoved, like the Seine past the stone stanchions of a bridge. Let Aramis be beaten by jealous husbands and hang from the Cardinal's windowsill like a fool. Let d'Artagnan dice with the devil chez Bonacieux. Let Porthos moon after robber girls and widows alike; they were their own men, after all. And never let it be said that there were days when only the drink made the brotherhood worthwhile.

 

When they have the luxury of staying in an inn now, Athos watches his three brothers sometimes and wonders what he has failed to see about these men all this time. But there are fellow travellers to talk to, a world to reacquaint himself with full of fascinating things; and long days in the saddle to mull over everything new he learns.

 

“Oi,” says Porthos, somewhere to his right. “Carrying on without us, are you?”

“Beg pardon,” says Athos, reining Peppercorn to a halt and realising the others have left the road to set up a camp to rest themselves tonight. “I was miles away.”

Porthos gives him a look and shakes his head. Aramis pickets the horses, and d’Artagnan wanders off to look for wood.

 

As the heat wanes out of the afternoon and bats begin to flitter overhead they light a fire; Athos stands and goes to fetch his saddlebags, with a mind to cook some food. They’re at the bottom of the heap of tack and saddles, and by the time he’s finished digging them out he realises that both d’Artagnan and Porthos have left the camp. True, the heap of wood by the fire is getting low - but then they should have known how much to fetch to start with.

In point of fact, they do know. This has never happened before.

Deliberate, then. On the opposite side of the fire Aramis sits, staring into the glowing depths of the flames. As Athos stops, the saddlebags clanking against his arm, he glances up, looks around, and clearly comes to the same realisation: they are uncomfortably alone.

 

There is a long, awkward silence before Aramis stands and goes to the other side of the clearing, where a break in the trees looks out towards the sunset’s fading rose. He kneels down, bows his head, and begins to murmur his eternal prayers.

Athos finds a profound irritation rising in his chest. He drops the saddlebags he's carrying with a clatter, yanks open the left one and sets about banging pots and spoons onto the stones around the fire. For some reason it irks him yet more that Aramis's concentration doesn't falter for a second. He finds dried meat, pease and herbs and decides it will suffice.

At length Aramis finishes his devotions and comes back to the fire; Athos, now with his back to the man, feels his presence like a knife-point between his shoulderblades. Stiffly he continues shredding the dried meat.

“Athos, have I offended you somehow?” comes Aramis's voice.

Athos feels his jaw tighten.

“No,” he says. “No, not in the slightest.”

“Don’t be obtuse.” Aramis comes round the fire and sets himself firmly down on the opposite side. “I know you don’t approve of what happened, but this is ridiculous. You’re behaving as if I’ve deflowered your daughter and seduced your - well, perhaps not seduced your wife.”

Athos gives a bark of laughter. “I hanged my wife,” he says. “Only to have her come back from the dead and haunt me. I have had more than enough of women for one lifetime.”

“Then what on earth is going through your mind?”

Athos stares him down. Aramis sighs and seems to deflate.

“Athos, I’m tired,” he says quietly. “It’s hard enough to bear all this without knowing my brother is disgusted with me as well. If you won’t tell me what you’re thinking, at least tell me why.”

“Why what?”

“Why you get so angry about this.”

Something snaps in Athos then that he hadn’t realised was fraying thin. He is angry; furious, in fact, angrier than he can recall being in years.

“This idiotic devotion,” he says. “Morning and night, over and over. Praying for your pregnant Queen. Why do you bother, Aramis? Is this whole matter somehow in your hands? She is not your wife and it will never be your child to moon over - why are you wasting yourself on this? You’re a fool. You’ve always been a fool. You throw yourself at any girl who’ll have you, and you never think for a moment what you make yourself look like or how much more you could be. You have wit and ambition, Aramis, _why do you do this to yourself?_ ”

Aramis lets the harsh words hang upon the air.

“It's penance, Athos.”

“What?”

“I'm not praying for her. I'm praying for my own soul. I went to confession, and -”

“You told a _priest_ that the Queen carries your child? Aramis -”

“Don't be stupid!” Aramis is on his feet suddenly, as close as he ever comes in conversation to raising his voice. “I said I'd got some high-born lady with child.”

Athos sneers. “And what did your father confessor have to say to that?”

“Very wise words,” replies Aramis evenly, his dark eyes hard. “He said I've become someone who can bed a woman without loving her. It’s true. And I have no desire to carry on being such a man.”

Emotion rushes over Athos like a dousing of icy water. His next words shock him as they snap out of his mouth.

“Has it occurred to you,” says Athos coldly, “that Her Majesty may be well aware of the problems the lack of an heir presents for France? That you yourself may have been nothing more than a pawn?”

And now he has something; now Aramis is truly angry. Now there’s a high flush on those tanned cheeks and the line of his shoulders is taut. His voice is strained, on the very edge of reasonable debate.

“That's not how it happened. She's not-”

Athos would not be a swordsman if he couldn’t press an advantage once he’s hit home. “Ten years ago I would have said the same of Milady.”

“Anne is not your devil of a wife!” Aramis yells.

“Anne,” echoes Athos quietly. “She is Anne to you.”

And he doesn’t know why, but that drains him of life and the will to fight as completely as a rapier through the heart.

 

 

Then… then there is a rustle behind him, and Porthos steps out from behind a tree bole. He hasn’t even got any wood in his arms.

“Are you seriously telling me,” he says, “that Aramis is the father of the Anne of Austria's kid?”

 

*

 

Aramis sits down again and puts his face in his hands. Athos is breathing hard, feeling as if he’s given everything to take his opponent down only to find another rushing him from the side. He tries to gather himself, tries to come up with something to say.

“Yes,” says Aramis quietly. “Yes, he is.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” says Porthos. “On a saggy-titted jenny ass in the middle of winter with the Virgin Mary and all her angels dancing a measure stark naked right behind.”

Athos is actually fairly impressed by that. Aramis just gives a broken-sounding laugh.

“Don’t bring God into this again,” he says.

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t,” says Porthos. “If it’s true you’re going to need all the help you can get. You fucking twat.” He goes to his knees beside Aramis and pulls the smaller man into a rough embrace.

“Athos, get that bloody stew going,” he says. “And don’t say too much while you go about it.”

 

Porthos’s hand is instinctively rubbing circles on Aramis’s back. Aramis wants to fold into his big friend, cling to him like a child; it’s been an eternity since anybody touched him with affection. He feels half-starved. “I knew that cock of yours was going to get you into trouble,” says Porthos quietly. “I just never thought it’d be this bad. Why didn’t you tell me? Tell us?”

“Because you’d end up on the gallows too,” says Aramis. “It wouldn’t matter if you knew it was treason or not, if you knew I was in the Bastille you’d break me out and that would be that. We’d both hang.”

“So I’m supposed to live without my best friend instead?”

“Porthos, you don’t know what you’re saying -”

“Yes I bloody do,” Porthos snaps back. “I haven’t got family, Aramis, I haven’t got a wife or kids or an old dad to worry about me. The Musketeers are my life. You are my family. I couldn’t live without you. I wouldn’t want to.”

Aramis’s throat burns with a new kind of shame. “I’m so sorry, Porthos.”

“Yeah, well,” says Porthos. “If you were serious about that, you wouldn’t have fucked the Queen, now would you.”

His eyes are wet as he laughs into Porthos’s arm.

 

 

D’Artagnan does, in fact, come back with firewood, Athos notes. So Porthos is the lying bastard, then. D’Artagnan drops his load by the fire with a huff and looks up, face open, obviously about to ask about the enticing smell of stew - then he takes in the picture before him and blinks.

“So I missed something,” he says.

Porthos and Aramis exchange a glance.

“You might say that,” says Porthos. Another look passes between them, and Porthos adds “Turns out Aramis is the father of Queen Anne’s kid.”

D'Artagnan looks from Porthos to Aramis to Athos, and back again. Aramis looks as if he might be ill.

“Seriously?” he says.

“Seriously,” Porthos replies.

Athos doesn’t speak much Gascon, but he’s pretty sure what the boy says next translates as “Fuck me sideways with the biggest log on that fire”.

Then he sits down hard, looks entreatingly at Athos and asks when the food will be ready.

It’s as good a next step as any, given the day.

 

*

 

There are few and rare pleasures to the life of a soldier, but the extraordinary ability to eat when food is available and sleep whenever there’s a moment spare can be a remarkable comfort in a time of crisis. Even Aramis eats a little, though less than he usually would. Silence falls once the stew pot is empty.

“So that's what all this is about, then?” d’Artagnan says eventually, gesturing to the woods around them. “The whole Gascony thing.”

“We've all been exiled to cover for Aramis, yes,” replies Athos.

“Oi,” says Porthos, expression darkening. “Save your bad temper for the ones who need killing, don't take it out on your friends.”

“I knew there was something going on,” says d’Artagnan. “Treville told me to mind my own business -”

“Treville was right,” says Porthos, still glaring at Athos across the fire.

“Have you ever come across the term ‘treason’, Porthos?” replies Athos acidly.

“Have you ever come across the term ‘supercilious cunt’?”

“Stop it, both of you,” says Aramis. He pushes himself to his feet and walks off into the trees.

“He’s right, Athos,” says d’Artagnan after a moment. “That wasn’t called for.”

It’s rare that the youngest of their party ever has a judgement to make. Athos feels partly as though he’s just killed a man in front of a child, and partly incredibly irritated that he should care. He is, however, old enough to know when the cards are stacked against him; he is now the recipient of both Porthos and d’Artagnan’s indignant glares.

“Forgive me if I don’t wish to be hanged.” He rises, and stalks after Aramis into the woods.

 

Aramis is kneeling by the stack of saddles and saddlebags, looking for something in his pack. Athos walks up behind him quietly.

“Aramis, I'm sorry,” he says. Aramis's hands still, but he doesn't look up. “I spoke harshly. It was unjust of me.”

Wearily, Aramis puts down the bag and comes to his feet.

“You never did answer my question,” he says, looking Athos in the eyes. “Why do you get so angry about this?”

Around the fire it had been a fencing match, of a sort. Athos can see now that he wanted something from Aramis, some spark, some acknowledgement that he knew Athos was alive. This is different; this is a raw honesty in Aramis’s eyes Athos doesn’t think he’s seen before. If he had a moment he might stop to marvel at just how much it takes to crack Aramis’s charm.

For a moment he flounders, unprepared in the face of such openness. “I – I meant what I said. I can’t understand why you waste yourself on these girls,” he says. “You’re… you could be -”

He stops, his words choked off by something he can't name. Fear curls in his belly. Aramis's liquid eyes are watching him intently. Something in this moment has Athos terrified.

“Athos?” prompts Aramis gently.

Athos lets out a long, slow breath and closes his eyes. So that’s what it is, then.

He turns away. “Christ,” he says. “I should have just gone and- Aramis, I’m sorry. I honestly didn’t know.”

“You should have done what?” Aramis’s hand touches his shoulder.

Athos straightens himself. “I should have gone down to the Rue Gaîté and bought myself a boy,” he says.

There’s a pause, and then Aramis’s hand draws back.

“Athos,” he says quietly. “I didn't know.”

“Yes,” he says, “I suspect it would have helped if I’d known too.”

It’s like the scab coming off a wound that’s festered - there’s such a sense of relief, yet at the same time what’s exposed now is appalling in another way. Athos feels as if he's naked.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. “It’s got nothing to do with all my high morals and loyalty to my King. I'm angry because I'm an old _roué_ and I'm jealous that you love Anne and not me.” His shoulders sag. Aramis looks down.

“But that's just it,” says Aramis. “I don't love Anne.”

“What?”

“How can I? She’s the Queen, Athos, I barely know her. She's a statue on a pedestal to me. A lady from a courtly romance. That’s what the abbé made me realise - that I loved the idea of her, not the person herself. I threw you out because you said the same thing to me and I couldn't stand the thought of - of being so cold. I can’t stop thinking about it. I'm beginning to think I don't know love at all.”

Athos looks deep into Aramis's eyes then, and sees an uncertainty he's never known there before. His heart goes out to his brother. He looks lost. He finds that his hand has come up to touch Aramis’s cheek.

Aramis's own hand covers his, and gently lifts it away.

“I'm sorry,” says Athos again. “I don't mean to –” He tries to draw back his hand, but Aramis's fingers tighten.

“I'm not disgusted,” says Aramis. “I thought I'd truly lost my brother. I thought I’d done something I couldn’t take back. You were angry because you care, that's-” His voice quavers and he swallows the rest of the words.

Athos draws him into an embrace. Aramis comes willingly, and they press their foreheads together for a long moment, breathing each other in. Athos bites his lip, turning his head slightly, silently offering Aramis a kiss.

Aramis stiffens a little, and blushes. He clears his throat. “I swore myself to celibacy. For a year.”

Athos must look utterly ridiculous in his startlement, because Aramis's face lights up in that wonderful, familiar smile and he laughs aloud.

“Now what?” shouts d'Artagnan from the fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is the reason the last one got delayed so long - most of this just wrote itself before I'd even started the last chapter, and then I had to do all the boring stuff to fill in the gap so that this made sense to everyone else. I've now run out of plot again(!) so there may be a pause while my brain cooks up the next batch, but for now - enjoy :)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The road long travelled comes at last to its end; the strangeness of looking at old places with new eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's been so long, everyone - hopefully I can be a little more regular in future. Also I'm having a crap day today so PLEEEEEASE comment if you're out there, I could do with cheering up. Tell me what you like, what you're wondering about, what makes you giggle and what makes you sigh :)

“ _You_? Celibate?”

“Porthos, don't look at me like I'm a performing pony, I am capable of self-control.”

The morning is cool and hazy; their breakfast of porridge is bubbling over the fire. They’re already dressed and packing their bedrolls away.

“It's not that,” says Porthos. “It's just – this is you, Aramis. You can't go two days without -” he gestures vaguely.

“It's been more than two weeks so far,” says Aramis dryly. Athos smiles down at his blanket; good start.

“That's not what I mean,” says Porthos.

“Well what do you mean?”

“I dunno, I just – you're -”

“Let us know if it comes back to you,” Athos puts in. Porthos glares, not without affection, and d'Artagnan laughs.

 

For all that the air is far clearer between them as they ride, Athos still passes the morning deep within his own mind. It makes sense; a lot of things he hadn’t known how to explain are falling into place. His willingness to make exceptions for d’Artagnan, for starters. Heaven but that boy is a pleasure to the eye. He spurs Peppercorn forward and rides ahead of the other three, if only to distract him from the boy’s long-muscled thighs.

So he’s a queer, then. He has the recourse of nobility; with money and rank, any vice becomes a mere personal quirk. There are stranger characters at Court than a morally corrupt Musketeer. And it’s sodomy they’ll hang you for, not the simple act of loving your fellow man. He recalls a couple of Greek texts in his father’s library that as a youth he’d slammed shut in embarrassment; perhaps he’ll have to go back and revisit them.

He wonders if this is something else he should resent Milady for. Whether the poison of her influence is what burned the love of women out of him.

He wonders if he’s always had this absurd melodramatic side.

After a while of this he gazes down the valley they’re following until his eyes can no longer distinguish treetops from haze, and decides that he can question himself until Peppercorn wears out his shoes, but he is likely the same Athos he was last night. He will make adjustments as and when he needs.

He rejoins the others, and is promptly asked for his opinion of the better kind of baldric for carrying both pistols and a sword.

 

That afternoon they ride into a small town; the place is gay with bunting and flowers, and people are clad in their brightest clothes. The local abbé is in the town square saying blessings over a pen of nonplussed sheep; on the way in they’d passed a meadow where youths competed to climb a greasy pole. An equally nonplussed pig appeared to be the prize. A festival day, it seems.

“Dammit,” grumbles Porthos. “I was looking forward to a bed tonight.”

“We might be lucky,” says Aramis. “Depends how many people have come to town.”

They send d’Artagnan into the inn, hoping his youthful verve and charm will help their cause. He comes out looking somewhat downcast.

“Hayloft?” enquires Athos.

“Hayloft,” d’Artagnan confirms.

They do at least get a hearty meal and a convivial evening of ale around the fire. D’Artagnan is somewhat unsteady on the hayloft ladder, and Porthos manhandles him cheerfully by the arse till he tips over the hatchway and collapses in the hay. Athos is quietly relieved it wasn’t him behind the boy.

Aramis, for his part, shares a brief glance with Athos in a moment when the others’ backs are turned, but curls up beside Porthos for the night. Athos takes his place on the other side of d’Artagnan; the boy is already sleeping, with a smile.

He hears Aramis and Porthos murmuring for a while, and rustles as they adjust and settle themselves. D’Artagnan twitches, mumbles, and rolls over, flinging an expansive arm over Athos’s chest. His ale-scented breath is moist in Athos’s ear. His arm is heavy, his slack hand large; Athos denies himself any thought whatsoever of the touch of that skin, any notion of the sensation of muscled limbs moving purposefully against him.

His cock, apparently, has declared itself a city-state independent of his mind. It takes not the slightest notice of his stern demands.

Athos sighs, tugs the boy’s blanket back over his shoulder before he freezes half to death in the night, and looks up into the dark with long-suffering eyes. God’s sense of humour hasn’t changed, then.

 

“I know what you meant this morning,” Aramis murmurs once they’re settled face to face.

“About what?” Porthos isn’t yet trying to sleep; Aramis had thought he’d be willing to listen, after last night.

“About me and - going without.”

“Mmm. It’s not about the -”

“No, exactly. I just like being -”

“Yeah.”

Porthos’s eyes are a sparkle in the darkness for a moment, and then his arm reaches out and pulls Aramis close against his chest. Aramis feels the tension drain out of him, and sighs contentedly. He feels Porthos’s midriff move in a silent laugh.

“Get your blanket sorted, then,” he says.

Aramis fusses with it, tucks them both in; Porthos shakes his head against Aramis’s crown, chuckling again, and Aramis falls asleep to a thumb stroking gently over his neck.

 

In the morning d’Artagnan wakes sneezing with hay dust and cursing the light; Aramis is a mop of hair atop a blanket burrowed firmly into Porthos’s side, and Porthos is lying back watching the swallows flit to and fro. Athos is nowhere to be seen, until familiar footsteps stump into the barn and his voice announces “Breakfast is inside.”

 

The rest of the leg down to Bordeaux flies by; and it seems hardly two days since leaving the port city that they are reining to a halt in d’Artagnan’s old home town.

 

*

 

D’Artagnan doesn’t know whether he’s grown taller in the months since he left Gascony, or whether the sights and sounds of the larger world he inhabits now have shrunk this old town square. He remembers the first time he ever came here alone; the enchanting lure of the inns, the clamour of the market, the sense of the world opening up before him. This quiet, dusty space is nothing like what he recalls.

“Quiet, ain’t it?” remarks Porthos.

“Gascony,” Athos shrugs, and falls silent again.

“To the inn, then?” asks Aramis, brightening.

D’Artagnan is about to protest that surely they can sleep at his family’s townhouse when it occurs to him he doesn’t even know if it’s still standing. He turns North’s head towards the archway leading into the inn yard.

 

“Welcome, messieurs, welcome to the Coq au Casque - good heavens, Master Charles?”

“Hello, Sounier,” says D’Artagnan, smiling.

“But look at you!” exclaims the innkeeper, whose comfortable chin and protruberant belly is an advert for his establishment’s food if nothing else. “All dressed up like a soldier!”

“A commissioned member of the King’s Musketeers, in fact,” Aramis puts in slyly, forgetting his woes for a moment to drag an expression of even deeper embarrassed fury to the boy’s face. Beside him he can feel Athos radiating amusement. D’Artagnan will not easily live this down.

“What news, what honour! Your father would be so proud, mon petit. Come, come, seat yourselves, you have come all the way from Paris?”

“Just before we settle in, Sounier,” says d’Artagnan, his voice heavy, “we are here on serious business.”

The rubicund little man stills, apprehension ill-suited to his round face.

“I’ll need to talk to Bognard if he’s still here,” says d’Artagnan. “I received word of Labarge’s actions, but no detail. I have come here to see what may be made of the farm.”

At that a sad kind of sympathy comes into the innkeeper’s eyes.

“I will send a boy for him,” he says. “Please, be seated, I will fetch you some wine.”

When it arrives it’s strong stuff. D’Artagnan looks at the bottle, recognising the vintage from Athos’s collection, and wonders exactly what Bognard will have to say.

 

Four hours later, as the sun is lowering and the shadows creeping long, the four Musketeers stand in front of the charred remains of what was once a comfortable farmstead. The scorched stones of a well still stand, its wooden rooflet fallen to ashes; blackened timbers, their surfaces cracked into patterns like the scales of black lizards, stand sentinel against an empty sky. It is at odds with the simple beauty of a country twilight.

“And the barn?” asks D’Artagnan.

“Much the same,” answers Bognard, a thin and sallow man who had been, it transpires, steward to D’Artagnan’s father. “Your mother could not recover herself, after losing the farm so close upon your father’s death.”

“Rest his soul,” murmurs Aramis quietly. Porthos hastily composes his face; he had been staring around like a child. Athos says nothing.

“She is living with Aunt Celine, yes, she wrote to me,” D’Artagnan says.

“It grows late, gentlemen,” remarks Athos, “and a burnt-out farmstead is no place to spend the night. Perhaps we should finish this business back at the inn.”

“There will not be a finish to this buiness for some time,” D’Artagnan disagrees, with an authority that takes Aramis by surprise. “But I see no reason to stand around and let the chill come down. Bognard, bring me those figures you mentioned tomorrow, and we’ll see what’s to be done about restoring the place somehow.”

 

As they ride back to the town D’Artagnan wonders; was this how his father had felt, when they rode out towards Paris that fateful day? He had thought that to be his own man would be a world of freedom, that he would live as he saw fit, beholden to no-one except perhaps his King. But instead he feels his shoulders weighed down with doubt and responsibility. So much is his to manage and maintain; the past has such a deep hold on the present, even now his father is gone. Perhaps this was how the plight of Gascony’s people had weighed on his father; perhaps it was this same heaviness that had pushed him to set out for Paris and the King. Suddenly he misses his father intensely; he would give anything to feel that hand heavy on his shoulder, and hear once again his teasing, his affectionate words of advice.

At least the family house was still untouched, shuttered and shrouded since his mother left; tomorrow they would move themselves there. At least he has that, the memores of his tutors and long afternoons in the garden, though the familiar cracks and crevices of the farmhouse are gone. He had known that place as a boy like his own earth-encrusted fingernails, played for hours in the fields and the barnyard. He recalls the chickens that scratched by the stables and ran cackling when he startled them with a whoop of glee; and Sabine and Giraud, the two immense draught horses with their glossy chestnut coats, long heads that wached him calmly over their stable doors after the day’s work was done. He wonders where the horses are now.

 

Athos watches Aramis’s face as D’Artagnan leaves their table early and makes his way up with a candle to their room. His brown eyes are rich with concern, following the tired set of the boy’s spine.

“Don’t worry about him so much,” says Porthos. “He was bred to it. He’ll be fine.”

“And look on the bright side,” Athos adds dryly. “We can’t end up sleeping in a barn we haven’t built.”

Aramis glances from one to the other of them, shakes his head fondly, and follows D’Artagnan up the stairs.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Way way back, ~~many centuries ago, not long after the Bible began~~ no wait, wrong show.
> 
> Way back before I transitioned, I used to be what people call a “seat of the pants” writer. I’d just pick up whatever was making me ranty today, and write until I couldn’t write no more. Sometimes I got finished pieces out of it, sometimes I got bits and pieces, and sometimes I got half a scene in and lost the will to live completely.
> 
> Then I transitioned, and my everyday life suddenly got a whole lot less frustrating and incomprehensible and soul-destroying. And all of a sudden I stopped writing completely. It took me a long time to figure out why, but I know now that it’s for no other reason than that I’d run out of rage.
> 
> The thing is that writing is good for me, heart and soul. It makes me happy, more reliably than almost anything else. It’s always been on my Life List to get a novel published before I die. And that means that if I want to get that book written and published, I’ve got to learn a whole new way to write. I’ve got to learn about the 99% perspiration, instead of the 1% inspiration.
> 
> So I worked all this out a few months ago, then I sat back and wondered: where am I going to start relearning how to write? 
> 
> Can you guess?
> 
> So, dear readers, you who have pesterated me constantly for love of this fic which I really didn’t think was going anywhere, this isn’t just me doing something for you - you reading it is doing something for me, too. Knowing that you guys give a damn is a really big thing for me - it’s why I picked this fic instead of the Bughouse Chess ones, though I’ve always felt I owed girl!Shep her happy ending. 
> 
> So I hope you all enjoy the new chapter - trying to write spy dramas in 16th century France is definitely a challenge - and I hope you’ll stick with me over the chapters to come.

The town house in Lupiac is a pretty enough place, Porthos supposes. Rustic charm, is what Athos says it has. For his money - not that he's paying to stay there - it's clean, well enough kept and has decently comfortable beds.

None of which explains why he hates the place.

"Athos, do you want a hand with the -"

"He's out," says the local woman who's been coming in to cook for them. "Off walking round the fields again with his head in the clouds."

Porthos sighs. Athos has been acting like a teenage girl lately. Wandering about the place at all hours, chattering to the townsfolk and extolling the virtues of every bush and tree. If it wasn't, well, Athos, Porthos would think he'd got a lover hidden away somewhere.

"How about you?" he asks her. "Anything you need a hand with?"

Lucille has raised five boys in the course of her long and comfortable life, and has neither fear nor innocence left in her soul.

"Get out from under me feet," she says firmly. "I've got the whole place to sweep today."

Porthos raises his hands in submission.

  


D'Artagnan is locked up in the office with that miserable donkey Bognard, nothing but a hum of voices and the unmistakable scent of tedium (which has always smelled a little like ink to him). He hasn't seen Aramis since breakfast. Standing on the porch he fiddles restlessly with his cuff. The lace is getting ragged from his boredom.

  


He’s on the bench outside the house, flicking cards into a flowerpot, when a gloved hand intercepts the jack of Spades.

"Aramis!" he says delightedly, making room on the bench. "Where've you been?"

"Nowhere much," says Aramis. "The chapel, of course."

Aramis doesn't often bring the subject up. Porthos pauses.

"Is everything -" he starts.

"Yes, yes," sighs Aramis. "Nothing changes, really."

There's an awkward silence. Neither of them needs to say it's not going to till the baby's born.

"We're going to need to go up to Tarbes soon," he observes. "The money's getting low. You should come."

Aramis looks at him sadly. "I don't really have the heart," he says.

"Come on," says Porthos. "We'll make a trip of it, have a few drinks, a game of cards -"

Aramis's face clouds, and for once Porthos honestly doesn't know what he's said wrong.

"Perhaps not," he says. "I think this is.. a good place for me to be right now."

He hands Porthos his card back and gets up to go indoors. Porthos is left staring at the grubby, uncomprehending face of the Jack.

  


The next day he tries going down to the ruined farmhouse to see if the builders want any help. They're not unimpressed by his strength, but they're obviously not used to people his colour. He doesn't need to speak Gascon to understand that's what they're talking about behind his back. He lasts until early afternoon, then gives up again.

  


The thing about the Coq au Casque is that it’s so unsettlingly _clean_. Porthos feels half naked without a nice patina of grime to blend his edges away into the woodwork. Even the walls have been freshly whitewashed - there are barely any tallow marks or smoke at all. But wine is wine, after all, and a bottle or so down he’s feeling something loosen in his soul.

“You’re one of young Master D’Artagnan’s men, are you not?” asks a stodgy-looking fellow, stopping by his table.

“Well, technically speaking Athos is in charge, but more or less,” says Porthos.

“Athos? Now he seems like a friendly fellow. Such a gentleman too - did he come from the nobility, do you know?”

“Blue blood for hundreds of years,” says Porthos. “Got land up near Paris too, a great big estate of it.”

“How long have you been serving with him?”

“Military man yourself, are you?”

“Nothing like you, my friend - what’s your name?”

“Porthos.”

“Alain Richard. Just a footsoldier, no hope of being a King’s Musketeer.”

“Always nice to meet a fellow soldier.”

Richard is a decent enough sort for all his stodgy looks and the conversation flows steadily enough. He’s clearly lived in Lupiac all his life and introduces Porthos to several other men who drift in as the twilight deepens. One of them, a lanky man called Jacques, is not long back from the Army himself and bemoans the dullness of Lupiac’s quiet life.

Porthos feels a familiar bubble of excitement well up in his gut.

“Well then,” he says, smiling expansively. “How about a little game of cards?”

  


“ _Porthos du Vallon!_ ”

The tone is so like Treville that Porthos has half come to attention before he realises the voice isn’t even Athos.

“D’Artagnan?” he says, peering towards the darkness under the arch.

“What in the name of God and the King do you think you’re doing?”

“Well, see, this gentleman and me, we had a little disagreement about the Queen of Hearts, and -”

The gentleman in question picks this moment to pass out, dangling limply from Pothos’s fist by his shirt.

D’Artagnan’s face appears inthe torchlight, hard as stone, and Porthos feels a momentary swoop of fear.

“You come to my home town,” says D’Artagnan, “you cheat my people, you beat them senseless and then you have the nerve to blame it on them?”

“Come on, D’Art, it was just a bit of fun -”

“Did you know Jacques’ wife is expecting?”

“Well how could I have done-”

“You will get back to the house, Porthos, and you will not disgrace the Coq with your presence again.”

Porthos opens his mouth to reply, but at last the weight of accusing stares filters through the pleasant haze of wine. Almost everyone in the inn is ranged around the edges of the courtyard, watching him silently. Suddenly, he realises that he’s a very, very long way away from home.

  


“Athos, I have better things to be doing with my time than dragging this idiot out of inn-yard fights -”

“I told you, it was just a misunderstanding -”

D’Artagnan rounds on him. “Misunderstanding my arse,” he snaps. “You were cheating the same way you always do.”

“Enough, both of you,” cuts in Athos at last from his chair. “Porthos, you will indeed stay away from the inn, and that is a direct order. D’Artagnan, go through his pockets and give back whatever he took from the others.”

Porthos sets his jaw but submits to the intrusion. D’Artagnan retrieves two more hidden cards as well as a quantity of coin and a couple of small pieces of jewellery, and fixes Porthos with a disgusted glare. Aramis sits at the table near Athos, pinching his brows in frustrated silence.

“And what are we going to do with him the rest of the time? Tie him to a chair?” asks D’Art.

“I think,” says Athos, “that I may have a solution.”

  


And thus it is that a day later, Porthos is standing - in the shade at least, thank heavens - listening to a mind-numbingly boring conversation about wheat prices. Athos lounges elegantly in a cane chair, twirling a silver fork between his fingertips as he makes conversation. They still have a mission, after all, to root out the underground railroad to Spain, and there are few better places to start than the gossip and petty rivalries of the local nobs. No smoke without fire - and no nobs without servants. It's at least a familiar misery - just as bad as being on guard duty at the Louvre, in fact - but without his friends in the same boat it's even more stultifyingly dull.

He nods at a maid passing with empty dishes, and receives a tight smile in return before she scurries away. The other servants are happy enough to talk to him - he's less of a novelty to them, their households being a little more upwardly mobile than the peasants - but the men are keeping the younger women firmly at a distance from him.

There are caged canaries singing on stands near the table; Porthos is no more free to go than they are. He's wryly reminded of the royal menagerie, of the great striped cats that pace restlessly behind their bars. He feels like one of them, dangerous and confined, transplanted to a dusty courtyard when he should be racing the jungles of intrigue and conflict.

“How are you finding Lupiac, Comte?” asks a blonde-ringletted lady clearly just as bored by wheat prices as Porthos is.

“I must say,” drawls Athos, “it’s so refreshing to be away from all the clatter and turmoil.”

Heads nod approvingly.

“But you must miss all the excitement of the Court?” presses Ringlets.

“Oh, it’s a very fine thing to be in His Majesty’s presence,” Athos assures her. “And of course in Paris one always sees the very latest fashions, and hears a great deal of news of foreign affairs. But I do find that after a while these things become… well, one soiree seems to blend into another, I’m sure you understand?”

“Entirely,” says Ringlets, with an apparently genuine sympathy. Porthos decides he likes her. She looks like she’d devour the adventure of a Parisian life.

“Well, Marquise,” cuts in an elegant man in his middle years, “perhaps you and the Comte here would care to join us for a ride tomorrow, to stave off the terrible boredom of the countryside?”

Athos’s posture shifts minutely; Porthos instantly focuses. This fellow is somehow of interest to their mission. He gives him a once-over. His coat is distinctly less out of fashion (out of Parisian fashion, he reminds himself) than most of the rest of the guests; a man with connections to bigger places, then. He seems faintly strained, but then the grey brocade is rather heavy and he’s sitting in the sun.

“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure?” enquires Athos genteelly.

“How remiss of me,” smiles the man. “Richard de Clozes.”

“Ah, the Comte d’Orleix? A pleasure.”

The conversation rambles on. There is little else Porthos can do but refill glasses and sweat. 


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am super excited to tell you that I have taken on finishing this fic (and hopefully starting a Captain America one once it's done) for this year's NaNoWriMo. So far I'm on target so I should be able to update weekly. I have no beta so you'll have to forgive me if I muck things up - I'm doing my best!

“I think that’s more or less all I can tell you,” said D’Artagnan, running a hand through his hair. “Before I left Lupiac I never really paid a great deal of attention to high society, to be honest.”

“No, no, it’s more than enough,” said Athos. “We cannot make any move without evidence, of course, and gathering that will be a delicate matter, but this will help me narrow down the field.”

A knock sounds at the study door.

“Yes, Lucille?”

“Bognard is here with the carpenter, my lord,” she says to D’Artagnan.

“Athos, would you excuse me?”

“Of course.”

Outside in the hallway Aramis is waiting. Athos jerks his head towards the kitchen.

“Well?” he says when they’re out of earshot. Athos is thankful that what stands between them has not, at least, affected Aramis’s instincts as a soldier.

“It’s as I suspected. Of course there’s the Duc d’Aquitaine -”

“- who is a noted loyalist -”

“- but beyond him, very few people have both the means and the reason to trade over the border at all, let alone regularly. D’Orlaix is one of them.”

“How very interesting,” says Aramis, narrow-eyed.

“Indeed. I think today’s little gathering may be instructive.”

 

 

Philippe tapped the tip of his quill against his chin in thought, then dipped it and began to write. It was a rather pretentious exercise, in his opinion - but then D’Orlaix rarely paid a great deal of attention to the opinions of Philippe Dansigny, and it was the Comtesse’s birthday, after all. All around him in the airy salon the air was full of the scratch of quill on parchment and a muted hum of conversation.

“What should I rhyme with ‘beauty’?” asked the Marquise from his side, in an undertone.

“Duty?” suggested Philippe. “No, too dull. We are supposed to be flattering her, after all.”

“Fruity?” suggested the newcomer Athos, dryly. Philippe suppressed a snicker. It had to be said that the Comtesse D’Orlaix was ripe of figure, although not yet blowsy despite bearing three children to her husband. And Athos’s wit (and apparent lack of a wife) was so terribly appealing, after so long in the shadow of D’Orlaix’s inexplicable devotion to the dreadful woman. Philippe glanced at him appreciatively; the afternoon light warmed golden highlights into his beard, and cast a pleasing glow over his features. He sat - or rather, sprawled with a kind of languid grace - upon a chaise, musing over his own composition. He was nothing like D’Orlaix, with all his dark refinement and ramrod-straight back; he had a way of slithering into the cracks in a conversation, turning it on its head and making it something amusing and strange. Yes, Philippe could stand to cultivate Athos a little more.

“And how goes your contribution to the birthday garland, Comte?” he enquired.

“Adequately,” replied Athos, glancing up briefly from his work. “I would not place my talent on a par with Madame de Rambouillet’s acquaintances, but I believe it will suffice.”

“Oh, have you had the pleasure of Mme. De Rambouillet’s salons?”

“Merely of reading the works of those who attend them,” Athos replied. “My position with the Musketeers keeps me occupied a great deal of the time.”

“Of course, of course.” Philippe thrilled a little to think of it - gunpowder and battle, the ring of steel on steel. He imagined Athos leading noble ranks of men to glorious victory over sallow, snivelling enemies… and then of course the camaraderie of the barracks, the hard-muscled bodies of soldiers, sharing everything from wine to warmth in the winter nights…

Beside him the Marquise, apparently still deep in conversation with the other Musketeer, Arras or Artois or whatever his name was, pinched him sharply.

“You are wandering,” she muttered.

Philippe adjusted his position a little, the better to compensate for his reaction to Athos, and returned to his poem.

 

 

The whole poetry thing was a mystery to Porthos. Why anyone would want a bunch of tedious verse for a birthday present was beyond him. Better a fine new handkerchief, or a feast with good friends - not that spending time with his friends was particularly enjoyable today, since he was playing servant to Athos’s Comte yet again. Today it mostly seemed to involve being on the receiving end of dirty looks from the Comte’s footman, a greasy-looking sort of bloke called Gace.

Athos had told him, when he complained about playing servant, that his position as one of the unimportant people in the room gave him the freedom to observe in a way Athos himself could not. He supposed there was something to that, but that didn’t make it any more interesting to do the observing. Take now, for example. Aramis was clearly struggling with composing a poem for the Comtesse; the woman with the blonde ringlets - the Marquise, everyone seemed to call her - was quite shamelessly monopolising his attention under the guise of helping him.

“Perhaps a metaphor?” she suggested. “Compare her to, oh, a flower, say, or a graceful creature like a deer?”

Porthos all but snorted. The Comtesse was a wonderful figure of a woman - she had olive skin, thick dark curls with only the barest threads of grey in them, and her generous cleavage rose like heaps of grain from amid rose-pink satin and a froth of creamy lace, meaning Porthos had had to tear his eyes away from it twice now - but she was built for bearing children, not grace and elegance. Her husband was clearly delighted with her; he’d spent the whole day hovering at her side and fetching her sweetmeats quickly enough to put the servants out of a job. Porthos imagined he’d be pretty happy with a bedmate like that, too.

“A little cliched, surely?” came Athos’s voice, the tone just on the edge of acid. His face when Porthos looked seemed bland enough, but he knew Athos well enough to sense the edge behind his words. What was he so upset about?

“I just find it hard to know what to say, that’s all,” said Aramis. Porthos had the odd feeling that he wasn’t talking about the poem.

Athos considered him for a moment, just long enough for the pause to develop weight.

“One should praise a thing of beauty from the heart,” he said finally. “Artifice is merely fashion; it will pass soon enough, as all these crazes do.”

Porthos glanced back to Aramis just in time to see him flush and look away. Ringlets - the Marquise, apparently - exchanged glances with the rather fey gentleman she'd brought with her. Porthos agreed.

There was something up with those two.

 

D’Orlaix clapped his hands.

“Ladies! Gentlemen! It is time to share our compositions.”

Philippe set down his quill and smiled; it was no masterpiece but it would do. The Marquise sighed, and Athos cast a final eye over his piece, scratched something out and corrected it before setting it down on a low table.

“Who will read first?” asked D’Orlaix. The Marquise raised her quill.

“He only does this so that he can best the lot of us with his own work at the end,” Philippe observed snidely to Athos. Athos returned only a faint amused smile.

The Marquise’s piece was themed on flowers, a little pedestrian perhaps but competently executed; a smattering of applause followed it. The other Musketeer declined to read his, claiming it was unfinished. Philippe had cribbed his idea from that English playwright with the absurd name, having purchased a small volume of his translated poems earlier that year; he fancied the applause that followed his own reading was a little more sincere.

Athos stood. “I beg the Comte’s indulgence,” he said with a bow, and began to read in a well-modulated voice.

 

Lines from the Loving Husband of a Flower

 

To that in which the Good Lord her arrayed

No silk compares; the jewels are but stones

Beside her eye; in word and deed she owns

A gen’rous grace. Capillament fine made

Adorns her brow; and where her hand hath laid

Lingers a holiness, as of saint-bones

A scent which cleanses, nay, which e’en atones

For all the sins that clamouring ardour made.

 

Upon my breast her touch rests now, beside

The trembling heart that I might call my own;

A pact between love and beloved sealed.

 

Ensnared thus, now I in her sanctum bide

My time which passes not and yet is flown;

Within this peace, God’s glory is revealed.

 

There was a moment’s pause before the room erupted into exclamations and applause. Philippe pounded his hands together until the palms tingled, transported by this new dimension to his Athos. A faint blush stained the Musketeer’s cheeks, making him still lovelier a vision.

“Splendid!” cried D’Orlaix. “Divine! You have quite the gift, Monsieur Athos.”

“I am certain it pales in comparision to your own work, sir,” Athos demurred.

D’Orlaix favoured Athos with a smile that wrung a twinge of jealousy from Philippe; how effortlessly Athos won all that which he would have given so much to achieve! But he reminded himself that D’Orlaix was married and absorbed in his wife, and schooled his thoughts to admiration of Athos in its place.

 

Later, over Rohais’s parlour table, they spent a delightful hour drinking tea and picking apart the poems of the day. Philippe always felt that his talent lay more in critique than in composition; he suggested several improvements to Rohais’s flower poem, and even began to wonder a little if Athos had wandered a little in the third line of the sestet - but it was not easy to compose poems in such short time, after all. Rohais was very taken with D’Orlaix’s piece, particularly the line in praise of his lady’s apple-scarlet lips, and he devoted some little time to helping her annotate its structure that she might learn to beter her own work. Eventually, she set the page aside and curled her feet into the folds of her gown, signalling a transition to the less formal part of their evening tradition.

“But speak to me about the Musketeers,” she urged him. “You seem very taken with Athos.”

“Is he not indeed a noble man?” said Philippe, blushing a little. “It cannot have escaped your notice.”

“What I noticed,” said the Marquise, “was a strange sort of a connection between him and Aramis.”

“Aramis, yes, that was his name,” said Philippe. “I must say I didn’t really pay much attention to him.”

“You, Philippe, single-minded?” Rohais was laughing at him, her eyes sparkling over the rim of her teacup.

“It is a great deal better than dancing attendance on D’Orlaix,” said Philippe tartly. “I cannot abide that wife of his, and if he is ever going to offer me some position of note I shall have paid for it tenfold in tedious misery first.”

Rohais threw back her head and laughed. “Such is the price of dipping a toe into high society, my friend,” she said. “Patience, only patience.”

Philippe sighed. “You are right, of course. But I shall better myself some day, my dear friend.”

 

Athos, pleasantly relaxed after a long bath, drew his chair a little closer to the fire and cracked open the slim volume Monsieur Dansigny had been so insistent that he borrow. The fellow was obviously as much an invert as Athos himself, if not more so, and Athos had felt a little guilty at using him quite so shamelessly for information; however he was full of gossip and had a sharp eye for details. His comments on the book Athos held in his hands had been decidedly interesting: he had directed Athos in particular to a poem titled “The Jealous Lover to the Blushing Maid”.

“You may find its use of simile particularly arresting,” he had said, cutting a glance sideways towards where D’Orlaix sat beside his wife, conversing with some of the other guests. “The author, it is said, caused quite the stir in Paris at the time - he was a noble youth given to… certain indiscretions, I’m sure you understand? I believe he ultimately had to leave the Court for fear of scandal. But his poetic gift - quite sublime, my dear sir, quite sublime. One might almost question the wisdom of the Church on such matters as love.”

Athos had been so strongly reminded of Aramis by the remark about questioning the Church that he’d been almost entirely unable to formulate a reply.

He turns to the page Dansigny had marked, and begins to read.

 

The Jealous Lover to the Blushing Maid

 

In laughing, sharing all that you can be

O lady, do you know you break my heart?

Do not you see my stumbling, humble part

In bumbling forward towards sweet rhapsody?

 

Thy hand upon his elbow courteously

Rests as to the arbour ye depart;

Beneath those boughs what cobweb words will start

Forth from thy lips, and bid all conscience flee?

 

O spread your gown, O beauty, lift thine eyes

And smile with lips as apple-scarlet beads;

A pleasure-palace surely is thy love.

 

Yet see his eye to heaven above him rise

And prayer from his hands like ichor bleeds;

What lady can outshine our Lord above?

 

Athos sat as still as stone for long minutes, a profound chord of recognition echoing through his being. For all his celibacy Aramis had lost none of the easy charm that defined his manner with women, nor indeed the storehouse of romantic observations that so pleased their ears. The Marquise had been captivated, and Athos silently furious, he now sees. He licks his lips, embarrassed, as the lines of his original composition for the birthday garland flash through his mind; _A pact, in silence, salt and senses sealed_. he had been forced to hastily alter it to suit the occasion, and was deeply grateful to his childhood tutors for the many hours they had spent drilling him in such things.

Dear Lord, this whole business was quite simply insane. He looked back down at the book in his lap, wishing momentarily that the apple-scarlet lips of some unknown lady might mysteriously appear to command his attention, rather than the lean strong limbs of his brother-in-arms.

He paused.

Apple-scarlet beads?

Hadn’t D’Orlaix written a line like that?

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your comments are love, joy and inspiration to me. Please tell me what you think!


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